Anaphylaxis
by lokogato-sama
Summary: Marius suffers delayed posttraumatic stress syndrome. Pseudoexperimental, vaguely symbolic, crazy survivors. [MariusCosette, slash if you want it]


Loko: One day, I was writing a 50000 word novel. I thought, brilliantly enough, that instead of writing said novel, I would write _fic_. So I did. And here it is.

Disclaimer: Modern Library's? Maybe?

Summary: Marius suffers delayed post-traumatic stress syndrome. Pseudo-experimental, vaguely symbolic, crazy survivors. Marius/Cosette, slash if you want it.

--

Anaphylaxis

--

When they take the bandages off his face he thinks he sees Courfeyrac.

It's not – it's the drab shades of the nurse's robes deceiving him – but it's enough for him to shoot up and scream.

They push him back down onto the bed, terrified for his safety, desperately saying things about internal bleeding and ripping open freshly-healed wounds and not to frighten the ladies, but he can't see anything but that dark hair.

Later he sees Jehan Prouvaire by his bed, feels him gently pulling the tangled mat of curls away from his face and singing a soft wordless lullaby.

"What did I say?" He asks suddenly.

"You said you were sorry," He says softly. Marius fixes his eyes at one place, which happens to be where Prouvaire's violet cravat and green waistcoat clash.

"Did I?" He says.

"Yes," He says, and brushes a stubborn lock of hair out of his face.

" – You wore those clothes at the barricade," Marius suddenly realises.

"Yes," Prouvaire says again. "Why are you sorry, Marius?"

"I don't know," He says. "Do you?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell me?"

Prouvaire shakes his head, sad blue eyes apologetic. "No."

Marius frowns. "You're dead, aren't you?"

Prouvaire makes no reply.

--

He wakes up sobbing unintelligibly in the middle of the night. His grandfather holds him down despite his trembling aged arms as the nurse forcibly reties all of the cloth he ripped off of his wounds.

"Why do you struggle against life so, Marius?" His grandfather asks, tucking a curl behind Marius's ear the way he never did when Marius was a child.

"I'm sorry," Marius says, not seeing his grandfather. "But you must be sorry too."

"I'm sorry, then," His grandfather says, bewildered and worried. "Marius, child, I'm sorry. To have you back is all I've wanted."

"Why do you haunt me so?" Marius asks. His grandfather has no response. "Why do you haunt me so?"

--

One day Courfeyrac steps through the door and Marius leaps up to greet him, only to feel something literally rip open in his side and collapse liquidly to the floor.

Nicolette and Basque struggle together to put him back into the bed, pull off the old bandages and put on new ones. Mademoiselle Gillenormand tsks over the bleeding and sends for the doctor again.

"I thought you were Courfeyrac," Marius says to Feuilly at one point, when the rest of them have left them alone for a little while.

"I thought that might be it," Feuilly says with a wry smile.

"Are you dead, too?" Marius asks. Feuilly keeps staring at him. "Can you tell Courfeyrac something for me?"

"Maybe," Feuilly says.

"Tell him I'm sorry," Marius says. "Tell him I'm so very sorry."

--

When Combeferre comes, he frowns.

"You're not healing well," He says. "Your body is trying to reject the medicines."

"I haven't any control over that," Marius says, smiling crookedly.

"But you do," Combeferre disagrees. "Most people heal only when they want to heal. Why don't you want to heal?"

"I'm not supposed to be alive," Marius whispers. "I'm not supposed to still be here."

"Well, where _are_ you supposed to be, then?" Combeferre asks.

"With you," Marius says. "Wherever you all are."

"We're not even all together sometimes," Combeferre says. "You must heal. You have more life on earth – that is the way our fates have fallen."

"But I'm alive and I shouldn't be," Marius repeats. "There is no further place here for me."

"If you keep saying things like that, some people will be very angry," Combeferre says, picks loose a badly tied bandage and fixes it with a deft expertise. Marius dully remembers those same hands tying off knots on shattered arms lying over bloodied tavern tables, winces and bitten-off screams of pain.

"Cosette," Marius says. "But I've lost her."

"You've lost nothing," Combeferre says. "And we, we've lost everything."

"Courfeyrac," Marius stops, considering. "Tell Courfeyrac."

"Yes?" Combeferre pauses at the door.

"Tell him he broke his promise."

--

Bahorel rips through the door, all brash and thunder and laughing, and quotes from Shakespeare to him: Julius Caesar, down with the tyrant, that sort of thing.

"I don't remember your death," Marius says conversationally.

"Eventually everyone will forget," Bahorel says easily. "It may as well start with you."

"Will everyone forget all of our deaths?"

"You're not dead yet," Bahorel says. "You can still make the world remember who you are."

"And if I only want to live my life with Cosette, what of that?"

Bahorel shakes his head, a smile playing around under his moustache.

"And that, he says, is fine too."

Before Marius can ask whom, Bahorel has gone out the door with the winter draft.

--

Poor Mademoiselle Gillenormand almost jumps out of her skin when Marius sits straight up in bed one night, feverish with his wounds, and cries out for Cosette.

"Where is she?" He demands of her, hair flying around like a Renaissance god, eyes flashing like a furious Jesus destroying a temple. "She is the only one who can save me now. Where is Cosette?"

"I don't know," She says, terrified. "I can't – I don't know."

He sinks down against the pillows, ignoring the warmth of the blood seeping out from his most persistent wounds. "Cosette," He whispers.

He's forgetting the gentle murmur of her voice against the ceaseless clamour.

"Cosette, you will forgive me."

--

Grantaire trips a little drunkenly crossing the threshold as always, and Marius smiles.

"I thought you might come, too," He says.

"I haven't anything better to do," Grantaire sighs, and sits heavily on the mattress. "How fare you, man of late night lovering?"

"That's not even a word," Marius says. Grantaire opens the shade, letting in the sun.

"Many things aren't," He says. "Maybe even 'love' wasn't a word until someone decided to make it one."

He has a point.

When Marius turns to ask him _where_, he's already gone, leaving behind a whiff of absinthe and a room flooded with light.

--

He falls into Cosette's arms one day when she comes into his room, eager to prove that he can now walk, and it is the closest contact they have ever had.

"You're healing, Marius," She says, all soft brown eyes and sweet beloved face, and he nods, smile wide.

"I am."

"Soon you will be well enough to take walks outside, and then all will be well – o! it will be glorious."

"Ah," He agrees. "And they will find me there, too, won't they?"

She looks at him, confused.

"Who, Marius?"

"O, them," He says carelessly. "They will always find me."

He notices her dear smooth brow creased with worry and feels guilt for having caused it, but he can't understand how.

--

"You mustn't get up just yet."

Marius smiles up at Joly's frown. Joly – one of the ones he hadn't known quite as well, but he remembers the concern, the worry, the ridiculous coats and hats in spring.

"The doctor says I'm well enough," He says cheerfully. Joly shakes his head and shuts the window.

"You mustn't suffer a cold draft, either," He scolds. "You're a grown man, Pontmercy, shouldn't you know better?"

Marius laughs outright.

"I'm getting married in spring," He tells Joly. "Tell him that, will you?"

Joly doesn't have to ask to know whom.

--

Bossuet comes in right after. Marius reflects and realises he hasn't ever thought of the two separately: Joly and Bossuet, Bossuet and Joly.

"This is a nice place you've got, Pontmercy," He says, admiring the woodwork and tapping the glass window. "Joly must have shut this for you."

"Yes," Marius says, watching the awkward, carefully controlled movements.

"Would you like it open?"

"It's alright," Marius shakes his head. Bossuet moves his hand away from the sash and to the head of Marius's bed, there follow a resounding crash, and he looks up at Marius with an apologetic smile. Footsteps sound up the stairs.

"I'm sorry," Bossuet says. "My clumsiness – even after death, you see."

"It's alright," Marius says agreeably. "But you must -- "

"Yes, I'll leave straightaway." Bossuet pauses on the threshold, glancing back at Marius lying against the sparklingly white pillows. "Have you any messages left?"

Marius almost says no, but he remembers. "Tell him thank you for me."

--

He creeps step-by-step down the stairs to greet Cosette and she laughs, delighted.

"O! but you are a gentleman, Marius," She says, then scolds, "But you mustn't strain yourself, you know."

"I love you," He says suddenly to her profile outlined against the warmth streaming in from the street and the freezing new year.

"I love you too, you dear silly thing," She is caught off-guard but offers him the most beautiful smile he has ever seen and he feels his heart fluttering somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, joyous as freedom.

--

Enjolras looks at him, piercing blue stare.

"More people than you deserve freedom," He says.

"I know," Marius says. "But I -- "

"But you," Enjolras says. "Are too weak at the moment to pick up our banner again. Wait."

Marius sinks back into the bed, relieved when the blond god strides from his room, a paragon of silent, relentless virtue.

--

"I have time," He tells Cosette one day as she sits by the bed with her sewing, cajoling him to have more of this or that on his tray.

"Of course," She says soothingly. "Some more broth, Marius?"

"Yes," He says, although neither of them knows to which statement he refers.

--

The doctors call it a relapse when he takes a step out the front door, sees the frosty floating snow, and shuffles noiselessly to the floor, mouth moving as if to speak but unable to make a sound.

When he finally relearns how his vocal cords work, he whispers "Time time timetime timetimetime time" over and over again; Cosette sits by him nodding, singing, wiping his sweat-dampened forehead with a wet cloth, crying sometimes with agony.

When he finally relearns how to make his eyes see, he looks at her face, smooth with youth and creased with worry and he wants to apologise, but he can't remember how to form his mouth around the word: DAY ZO LAY. _De_solée, _de_solée, and with a slender slipping rhythm his mouth creaks into a smile for their love.

--

"I'm sorry," He tells all of them assembled by his bed, and they nod their heads, even curt gold-bright Enjolras, some smiling, some frowning, all silent. "Tell him to come."

One of them asks why, and he can't remember.

--

He dreams of a day he doesn't recall happening, a day that he can feel perfectly against his closed eyelids and slides away the instant he opens them, a flutter of his hollow heart and then uncertainty.

"1832 is a leap year," He says to himself. "February 29th only happens once every four years."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand, walking by the door to his room, looks in worriedly, but he is weeping silently into his pillow and she decides not to disturb a man with his tears.

"And come outside," He whispers into his sodden pillow, eyelashes glistening with the dawning of spring. "For this day echoes only rarely in our lives. So let us live."

They've both broken their promises.

He needs to know that he's been forgiven.

He needs to say that all is forgiven.

He needs.

--

They don't come to him the first time he walks outside, deliriously giving Cosette his arm and swirling somewhere into heaven at the sound of her laughter pointing out the fragile green of spring melting winter.

--

There is still dew on the grass-blades when he takes Cosette to the Meadow of the Lark, tells her of how this meadow reminded him of her, how it still does – she smiles softly, saying something like love.

"They called me the Lark once, you know."

"It fits," He tells her, and she laughs, her entire face blossoming into a purely angelic bliss.

--

One morning, when he is strong enough to sally forth on his own, he walks out to the Meadow and sits on the grass, not minding the dampness soaking through his clothes and chilling into his thighs.

There begins a light drizzle, he looks at his watch, and then very suddenly he is pressed against the earth, trying to push every particle of his being into the land because he is alive and he is _alive_ and _he is alive,_ and the earth smells like metal in his nose and for the first time he doesn't think of blood, he thinks of a hard bright smile, he thinks of how he can feel the dirt digging under his fingernails and the wet grass pushing against him and the pulse of the world in time with his heart live _live_ live _live _--

-- and when he looks up, he's expecting what he sees.

--

words: 2141

paragraphs: 141

sentences: 189

--

Open to interpretation -- find the Symbolism of d00m! (It's a real game, played by real children in real literature classes in high-schools the world over.)

Loko


End file.
